The art of alignment

Mahmood Rezaei-Kamalabad sits surrounded by his art, hulking steel sculptures filled with symbols of heaven and earth. With fingers stained black, he drops a white cube of sugar into his tea and talks about his conversations with God.

The phone rings, the sound echoing shrilly between the concrete walls. "Aladdin," he answers, then listens for a few seconds. "Yes, brother," he says. "I have fixed your car."

Rezaei-Kamalabad carries out his work, both spiritual and automotive, inside the cinderblock rectangle of Aladdin Auto Service in North Cambridge.

One side of his garage is filled with his sculptures and other art, including a book called "The Light" - the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Koran, all bound together.

On the other side of the garage, where a white sedan is hoisted on a lift and the concrete floor is spattered with grease, he fixes faulty alignments and adjusts brakes.

Next month, Rezaei-Kamalabad will open the doors of his garage, hidden behind a movie theater at Fresh Pond Mall, for a three-day art show called "The Truth of Spirituality is Happiness."

Raised Muslim in Iran, he slowly came to believe that the world's three major faiths have much in common.

"I see all the religions are connected," he says. "The spirit of God is within the individual. And everyone has that spirit."

Rezaei-Kamalabad, 55, left Iran in 1978, and came to the United States to study art. He spent a year learning English and then began taking courses wherever he could: the Massachusetts College of Art, Emerson College, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. He received bachelor's and master's degrees from the Massachusetts College of Art and decided to enroll in a Phd program at Boston University.

But he had married a photographer he met in school, and their family now included two young children.

Rezaei-Kamalabad would leave the house at 4:30 a.m. to drive his taxi for the morning before heading to class. He'd drive for a few more hours in the middle of the day, return to more classes, and then study in the library until 9 p.m.

His children were asleep when he left in the morning and asleep when he returned at night.

"I had a choice between the PhD and the family," he says. "So I quit the PhD."

The day he decided to leave academia, he stopped his car along Memorial Drive in despair and sat facing the Charles River near the MIT dorms.

"I stopped to sit and cry. And I said, 'God, what am I going to do?' " he recalls. "I was so under pressure. And God said, 'Look at all of these cars coming and going. They need to be fixed.' "

So Rezaei-Kamalabad enrolled in a General Motors auto repair school and began learning how to fix cars.

For five years, as he gradually built up his supply of tools, he serviced cars in parking lots and along the street.

Finally, in 1993, he opened Aladdin Auto Service on Rindge Avenue in Cambridge. He moved to a bigger space, behind the Entertainment Cinemas off Alewife Brook Parkway, three years ago.

Rezaei-Kamalabad, who has been the subject of three documentaries, works in a dark mechanic's uniform and a gray knit prayer cap. For his art, he buys giant industrial-sized sheets of steel from an industrial supplier in Dorchester.

"Steel has a very good nature," he said. "It bends, it welds, it cuts, it heals. Whether inside or outside, it doesn't matter. It has a very strong freedom."

He once left some of his large sculptures outside, and the blood-colored rust became part of his art. But he moved his pieces after the management of the Fresh Pond Mall objected, he said.

His work seeks to show how Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are aligned with one another, and often incorporates the number 7, a recurring number in all three faith traditions. One of his sculptures, "Light Bulb," intertwines a cross, a menorah, and "Allah" written in Arabic. It stands 10 feet tall and weighs more than two tons.

He believes that kneeling and bowing to the ground, the way he was taught as a child, degrades the human spirit, so he prays standing up.

"I do not pray in the way of the Muslim people," he says.

A low table in the center of his sculptures holds a Ziploc bag of nuts, for his guests, and copies of Sky & Telescope, which feeds his fascination with the heavens. A pot of tea, cloudy with seven spices, is always brewing.

"Tea will be ready for you," he tells potential visitors, both in person and on his website, mrkart.com.

Those who have reviewed his auto repair service on Yelp.com are pleased with his service.

And yet, the reviews are filled with stories that barely mention his automotive skills, so startled are they to find a mechanic who serves tea and fills his garage with sculpture.

"His garage is filled with artwork. Yes, artwork," marveled one customer.

"Mahmood will offer you tea," another customer wrote, "sit you down, tell it like it is (oh, and fix your car, too) and not rip you off in the process."

Kathleen Burge can be reached at kburge@globe.com.